Posts Tagged ‘Appistry’

At GoGrid, we firmly believe that having a rich and developing Partner ecosystem is critical to not only our success but also our customers. GoGrid Partners bring an incredible amount of value-added tools and services in the form of what we call PGSIs (Partner GoGrid Server Images) and we work with them closely to ensure that our joint offerings provide as much value as possible. If you haven’t explored the GoGrid Exchange, I encourage you to do so as we have a variety of tailored solutions to meet a wide variety of needs.

Categories for PGSIs currently include: Software & Applications, Development & Testing, Disaster Recovery & Backup, Cloud Management, Security, Monitoring & Reporting and more. Also, we are actively looking for new technology-enablers in the form of Partners so if you have a SaaS or PaaS offering that you would like to potentially be included in the GoGrid Exchange, simply fill out this form and we will start you on your way. All of our current partners are listed here.

Have you used a Partner GSI? If so, every Partner Server Image has a rating and comments section so that you can Review any of the images that you use. We hope that you will provide feedback as it helps us and our partners better evaluate the usefulness of their images on GoGrid.

An interesting article was posted to the Outsourcing Journal that is relevant to anyone considering using the Cloud as a viable infrastructure strategy. There are plenty of important topics & points in this article, especially as many companies begin moving full infrastructure to the Cloud. Using cloud infrastructure hosting provided by GoGrid and the CloudIQ platform by GoGrid partner, Appistry, companies can move their applications into the cloud for free[1].

It’s still cold in San Francisco. No snow today but there are a few “clouds” (sorry). Posts and articles I saw today:

Windows Azure and the many faces of cloud
“One of the reasons it’s so difficult to satisfactorily define cloud computing is that people have many different needs and expectations from a cloud platform. To start a conversation about cloud — especially one that seeks to evaluate the relative merits of competing cloud platforms — without first identifying what needs are being met is to invite misunderstanding and confusion. So before I come to my analysis of Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform and the hidden danger lurking there for many ISVs looking to embark on a SaaS strategy, I’m going to segment cloud computing into several important but separate categories.” (source: ZDNet)

Commentary: This article is an extremely good analysis of Windows Azure and details a series of use cases for companies evaluating Azure as a solution including: “Short-term, overflow or burst capacity to supplement on-premise assets, Cloud-based services and applications that extend on-premise assets with new capabilities, Interim hosting as part of a cloud migration strategy, and, Cloud-based services and applications that replace and supersede on-premise assets.” One way to use Azure and GoGrid together is outlined in this post (with a demo video) where we demonstrate how the GoGrid cloud can be used seamlessly building, deploying and testing applications for Windows Azure.

Gartner “Cloud Computing in the Real World” Panel Features Appistry Customer Next Century
“This year cloud computing is front-and-center at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit in Las Vegas, NV. One of the many interesting items on the agenda this year was today’s no-BS enterprise cloud end-user panel, organized by analysts David Cearley and Gene Phifer, along with the OMG/SOA Consortium. The focus of the panel is on real-world, enterprise-grade cloud computing deployments.” (source: Appistry blog)

Commentary: Appistry has been a long-time partner of GoGrid’s. We have a RHEL image that has Appistry already baked into it. It’s nice to get Sam’s analysis (in the form of a case study, albeit from our competitor) of the practical applications of moving physical infrastructure into the cloud. Sam points out how there is a lot of “fluff” around the promotion of Cloud Computing and that actual case studies are the way to cut through the hype. The study talks about how with physical infrastructure costing $80k and consuming 8-14 days of processing time, the same process could be achieved within 12 hours and only costing $130 per run. The same could be done on any Infrastructure-based Cloud with dramatic time and cost savings. It was also nice to see the GoGrid Cloud Pyramid in the graphic.

Government Technologist: States As Cloud Service Providers
“As state CIOs devise cloud computing strategies, they must assess whether their teams can provide services with the same skill and efficiency as commercial providers. Some state CIOs are evaluating cloud computing as the way to provide IT services to state agencies and other groups of users, including local governments and schools. It makes sense for states to go this route, but there’s a right way and a wrong way.” (source: InformationWeek)

Commentary: Author John Foley brings up some interesting points here. Do States and Education go with Private or Public Clouds? Or is there a happy medium? It seems that while some items must remain under strict “state” control, others could easily be offloaded to a public cloud. State budgets are in the red now, so plopping down multi-millions of dollars to built their own private cloud is probably not something that tax-payers could swallow very easily. The right strategy I would think is to do a cost-benefit analysis on a gradual move of non-critical/data-sensitive IT infrastructure to a public cloud. The problem here though is that “gradual” is an extremely subjective term. For me, gradual would be over a quarter or two. For state/government, “gradual” means 1-2 years or more. There are many efficiencies to be gained as well as considerable cost saving (that could be invested elsewhere…education perhaps?). One way or another, I agree with Foley in that governments should offload some of the risks and costs onto public cloud providers when implementing their IT strategies.

This morning we announced that Appistry EAF Community Edition has been released within the GoGrid cloudcenter infrastructure. The press release can be viewed here. Full contents of the release are below.

San Francisco, CA February 26, 2009 — GoGrid, the Cloud Computing division of ServePath, LLC and Appistry today released new tools for developers, architects and administrators designed to ease the pain associated with developing, deploying and managing applications in the Cloud. Appistry’s Cloud application platform, named Appistry EAF, helps businesses and enterprises efficiently manage and scale their applications within the GoGrid infrastructure. With this joint solution, larger companies are able to take full advantage of the Cloud’s unique value proposition of elastic scalability, solid reliability, automated management and CapEx economies.

Appistry EAF Community Edition 3.9 is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 users. Additional EAF-enabled GoGrid images will be rolling out in the near future. Appistry EAF Community Edition allows developers, system architects and administrators to take advantage of Appistry’s Cloud application platform for free on up to five GoGrid Cloud Server instances. Appistry EAF functionality and benefits include:

Last week, I participated in a webinar with GoGrid’s partner, Appistry, that was titled: “Unlock the Power of Scalable, Agile Cloud Platforms.” To quote: “Cloud computing has grown from a little-known buzz word into one of the hottest topics in IT today. View this On-Demand Webinar to learn how to get started with this exciting new technology. More importantly, learn about the best practices for enabling your applications to scale and truly harness the power of cloud computing.”

Sam Charrington (Vice President of Product Management & Marketing at Appistry) and I (Michael Sheehan – Technology Evangelist of GoGrid) discussed not only what the Cloud currently looks like (especially as related to Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Platforms) but also showed a demo of how the Appistry/GoGrid solution works through a live demo of the product.

Shown below is the Webinar in its entirety (complete with plenty of audio mishaps, dropped calls and scratchy voices).

Also, there were several questions related to GoGrid asked during the webinar that were quickly answered or not answered at all. I wanted to provide some responses to those questions within this post. (Note: not all questions that were asked have been answered.) So without further ado…

Q: What is GoGrid’s role in this partnership?A: GoGrid provides the Cloud Infrastructure on which the Appistry Platform runs. Customers who wish to dynamically scale their application code and deploy across multiple cloud servers use Appistry to manage these dynamics and the application code is deployed and scaled across GoGrid servers within the GoGrid infrastructure.